France's Latest sensation... a perverse imagination of startling intensity.

The “world in ruins” shows up in contemporary cinema with regularity. Two different visions of the situation are presented in Godard's Weekend and Zetterling's Night Games. In both films social breakdown is well advanced; Godard's world, in addition, has gone physically to pieces. Cannibalism occurs; and we are reminded of Molyneaux. Zetterling's people, in a trance of activity and disguised interaction, play out their games in a chateaux that must be like the one in which Molyneaux's Marcelle is trapped. Sex is certainly an overriding issue in all these works—but in what peculiar ways it presents itself.

The world is in ruins. And time has ceased to behave in a sensible fashion. The phenomenon is different from the “timelessness” of classical pornography, in which (1) nobody grows old, (2) everyone lives happily, or at least busily, ever after, and (3) there is no external pressure to hurry up or to slow down. What happens instead in the modern erotic literature of the kind under discussion is (1) everything seems to happen in the wrong order, or (2) time has stopped moving altogether, and the characters are uncomfortably aware of this.